docs: new blog post for release candidate

.github/actions/spelling/expect.txt

@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 activemetricsobject
 addprefix
 afero
+agardner
 agg
 Akshay
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docs/blog/.authors.yml

@@ -19,3 +19,8 @@ authors:
     description: Member
     avatar: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/50154848?v=4
     url: https://github.com/staceypotter
+  agardnerIT:
+    name: Adam Gardner
+    description: Docs Maintainer
+    avatar: https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/26523841?v=4
+    url: https://github.com/agardnerIT

docs/blog/posts/stable-release-announcement.md

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+---
+date: 2024-03-15
+authors: [agardnerIT]
+description: >
+  This blog post announces the release candidate for Keptn v2.
+comments: true
+---
+
+# Announcing the Official Release Candidate for Keptn v2
+
+The Keptn project is proud to announce a release candidate for what will become Keptn v2.
+We are sharing this release candidate
+so that the community and end users can participate in the testing
+to ensure that the actual release is as robust as possible.
+We anticipate (as long as no release blockers are identified)
+that Keptn v2 will be released approximately 1 month after this announcement.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+## What problem does Keptn solve?
+
+Deploying software using Kubernetes is, on the surface, easy.
+Just use `kubectl` or a GitOps solution like [ArgoCD](https://argoproj.github.io/cd/) to deploy a YAML file and that’s it, right?
+Well, no.
+Not normally.
+There is a lot more to ensuring a healthy deployment.
+The pod(s) may be running, but that doesn’t automatically mean that the application is healthy.
+This is the problem domain that Keptn acts upon.
+By using Keptn, in combination with your standard
+deployment tooling or practices, you can move from “I guess it’s OK” to “I know it’s OK”.
+Keptn allows you to wrap governance and automated checks around the deployment process to ensure that
+the end-to-end process of deploying is healthy and your application is meeting the SLOs you’ve defined.
+
+## What’s New in the Keptn v2 release candidate?
+
+User feedback to the Keptn project has been clear, and we’ve listened.
+Keptn v2-rc will bring the following new features:
+
+- Non-Blocking Tasks
+- A new “promotion” stage
+
+### Non-blocking tasks and evaluations
+
+Keptn offers the ability to perform arbitrary tasks and SLO evaluations both before a deployment and after a deployment.
+By design, any pre-deployment task or SLO evaluation that fails will block the deployment.
+Often, this is the behaviour you want – if a downstream dependency is unavailable or unhealthy,
+you probably don’t want to complete the deployment.
+However, for new Keptn users, this behaviour can appear drastic and cause deployments to be
+“pending” without an obvious cause.
+In Keptn v2 this blocking behaviour for pre tasks and evaluations can be temporarily disabled for the cluster
+until you are sure that your tasks and evaluations
+are performing appropriately.
+When creating the [KeptnConfig](../../docs/reference/crd-reference/config.md) resource, set `spec.blockDeployment: [true|false]`.
+The default behaviour is for Keptn to block deployments (i.e. `spec.blockDeployment: true`)
+
+### The Promotion Stage
+
+Keptn v2 introduces a new “promotion” phase
+to support multi-stage application delivery.
+Keptn is commonly used alongside [GitOps practices](https://opengitops.dev/) and thus,
+users want to have a dedicated way to promote an application to the next stage in my environment.
+The new stage is disabled by default and can be controlled via the Helm flag:
+`lifecycleOperator.promotionTasksEnabled: [true|false]`.
+The upcoming stable release will be shipped with this feature enabled out of the box.
+
+Further information can be found in
+The
+[Multi-stage application delivery](../../docs/guides/multi-stage-application-delivery.md)
+guide.
+
+## Try it out
+
+Now, you can see a true end-to-end picture of everything in the logical order,
+potentially from “PR merged” all the way to “deployment complete”.
+[Download Keptn v2 RC1 Now!](https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/lifecycle-toolkit/keptn)
+
+[Keptn v2 Release Candidate 1](https://github.com/keptn/lifecycle-toolkit/releases) is available now on GitHub.
+Please provide any feedback via the #keptn Slack channel in the
+[CNCF Slack workspace](https://communityinviter.com/apps/cloud-native/cncf) or raising issues in our
+[GitHub repository](https://github.com/keptn/lifecycle-toolkit/issues).